By Richard Johnstone | 15 January 2015
Councils lose at least £18m a year due to government rules that stop them from charging pubs, nightclubs and off-licences the cost of licence applications.
Publishing the figure, the Local Government Association said this amounted to a quarter of the annual street cleaning costs for English councils, and could pay the salaries of more than 5,000 social workers and 9,000 care workers, or fill three million potholes.
Under the national licensing regime, authorities are not able to charge firms for additional costs that result from processing applications, holding consultations and hearings, or investigating and taking action on licensing breaches.
Fees remain the same as those originally set in 2005, and range from £21 to £37 for a personal licence and £100 to £635 for a premises licence.
Since these fees were set, councils have lost out on an estimated £169.5m, and LGA licensing spokesman Tony Page said the increasing cost was now diverting money away from vital services.
‘Pressure on vital services, such as looking after the elderly, protecting children, repairing the roads and collecting bins, continues to grow,’ he said. ‘Yet councils will receive 8.8% less funding from government to run local services from April.
‘At a time when every penny is needed to protect essential services, it is unacceptable for councils to keep being forced to spend millions each year to subsidise the drinks industry. This is money which would be better spent patching up our crumbling roads and easing the pressure on squeezed social care budgets.’
He added that councils were ‘desperate to settle this ever-growing tab once and for all’ and called on the Home Office to act upon its consultation, held last February, to allow fees to be set by authorities.
‘We need the government to finally honour its commitment to introduce locally-set fees to allow local authorities to recover the actual cost of applications and end such a needless waste of taxpayers’ money.’
